11/10/2023 0 Comments Waist deep in big muddy![]() The average cocoa grower in Ivory Coast farms three hectares, yielding 450 kilograms per hectare. Ghana, meanwhile, is phasing out subsidies for fertiliser and pesticide treatments, putting an end to initiatives that many credit for a rapid rise in production over the past decade.īut the most serious threat to the sector’s future is poverty. While the country harvested a record crop of 1.5 million tonnes of cocoa two seasons ago, the government is now expelling farmers from plantations illegally established during a decade-long political crisis that ended in 2011. ![]() The average age of growers in Ivory Coast is around 50, just four years shy of the average life expectancy of an Ivorian man. Plantations are ageing, and so are cocoa farmers. He said he didn’t have figures to quantify the threat, but the regions at risk are in Ghana’s top cocoa-producing belt.ĭespite its global dominance, the long-term prospects for West Africa’s cocoa sector are surprisingly bleak. “The future of our crop is threatened if this continues.” “It’s not just ravaging cocoa crops in those areas but it makes major cocoa districts in the Eastern and Ashanti regions very vulnerable,” Emmanuel Opoku, deputy director of research at Ghana’s cocoa marketing board, Cocobod, told Reuters. Assin Fosu and adjoining districts have also been hit hard. In Ghana, Africa’s second-largest gold producer, Wassa-Akropong in the west and the central region of Dunkwa have been prime targets for miners. In Ivory Coast, where artisanal mining has historically been concentrated in the arid north, diggers are moving into cocoa-growing areas around Issia, Duekoue, Zoukougbeu, Bouafle and Daloa - the latter producing a quarter of national cocoa output. You don’t need your fields any more.” PRISONERS OF POVERTY ![]() “You can make 100 million CFA francs (126,401 pounds). Severin Konan, a cocoa farmer who manages the land for his family, is unapologetic. In some areas, diggers have begun using toxic cyanide and mercury to extract gold from the ore they mine. There are no trees left here to block the sun that beats down on diggers balancing sacks of dirt on their heads and women wading waist-deep in muddy pools to wash gravel, their infant children tied to their backs.Īfter two months, gold output from the site is falling off, and many of the 300 shafts on the two-hectare plot have been abandoned as miners move on, leaving desolation in their wake. Kouassi says he is being careful, and his plantation will survive once the gold is exhausted, probably in just a few months, but a stark reminder of the risks lies just a short walk away.ĭown a dirt track lies a scarred landscape of pits and mounds of brown-red dirt. With high prices for the precious metal fuelling a gold rush in Ivory Coast and Ghana, diggers are scurrying to cash in.īut the drain on the labour market and the harm done to plantations could endanger cocoa production in the two nations, which account for 60 percent of global supply. “As long as there’s gold here, we’ll be working,” he says, with the giddy smile of a man who thinks he’s won the lottery. The 35-year-old, who once struggled to pay school fees for his five children, has in a matter of weeks pocketed as much as he could hope to earn in five years growing cocoa. Today, nearly three dozen vertical shafts plunge down into the soil beneath Kouassi’s cocoa trees, branching out into a web of underground tunnels 10 metres below the surface. And as the story repeats across the cocoa heartland of the world’s top producer and neighbouring Ghana, the second-largest, it could do lasting damage to the industry. ![]() With luck, it could transform his life, but it could just destroy his farm. Prospectors pan for gold at a new gold mine found in a cocoa farm near the town of Bouafle in western Ivory Coast March 20, 2014. ![]()
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